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What
Saint Paul Really Said:
Was
Paul of Tarsus the Real Founder of Christianity?
N.T.
Wright
(Grand
Rapids: Eerdmans, 1997),
reviewed by
Tom Hicks*
N.T. Wright?s book mounts a direct assault against
the biblical doctrine of justification. It denies both the
imputation of Christ?s righteousness and the saving significance of
free justification by grace through faith alone. By doing this,
Wright?s volume cuts the ground from underneath the gospel itself.
Let there be no mistake ? his denial of the cardinal doctrine of the
Reformation is not just an ?alternative reading? of Paul. It is a
perilous error that may have disastrous effects in the church if it
is not corrected. The great and only hope of poor sinners is that
God declares them to be righteous by pure grace on the sole basis of
the righteousness of Christ.
Wright arrives at his wrong conclusions about justification as a
result of forcing Paul?s theology into conformity with Judaic
covenant theology. He basically agrees with E.P. Sanders, who argued
that Judaism was not a legalistic religion of works, but a religion
of ?grace? (18-20). What Sanders meant by
this is that God?s people enter the covenant by grace, but they stay
in the covenant by their own works of covenant faithfulness (18-20).
Sanders says that Paul?s arguments against legalism are incorrect
because Paul was wrong about the true nature of Judaism and the Old
Testament. But, contrary to Sanders, Wright says that Paul not only
understood the Judaism of his day, but also embraced it. According
to Wright, Paul does not oppose works-salvation or legalism in any
of his letters because there was no such Jewish legalism to oppose.
Rather, Paul?s polemic was primarily directed against Jewish
nationalism and ethnocentrism. According to Wright, therefore,
Luther and the Reformed tradition blundered badly in their
interpretation of Paul.
Wright also says that a major aspect of Paul?s message was church
unity. However, Wright?s appropriate concern with the unity of the
church drives him inappropriately to interpret justification in
terms of church unity rather than salvation. He believes that the
true doctrine of justification should encourage an ecumenism in
which differing theological traditions join together in fellowship
under Christ.
The Righteousness of God
Wright
explicitly denies the classical Reformed doctrine of the imputation
of Christ?s righteousness. He insists that the term ?the
righteousness of God? never refers to God?s gift of imputed
righteousness but always to God?s own covenant faithfulness. That
is, when Paul uses the phrase ?the righteousness of God,? he always
and only means that God is the righteous and just ?covenant judge?
because he upholds the stipulations of the covenant and enforces its
sanctions. Wright makes clear his denial of the Reformed view in the
following statement:
If we use
the language of the law court, it makes no sense whatever to say
that the judge imputes, imparts, bequeaths, conveys or otherwise
transfers his righteousness to either the plaintiff or the
defendant. Righteousness is not an object, a substance or a gas
which can be passed across the courtroom. (98)
However, in
spite of this strong and somewhat sarcastic denunciation, Wright
does not establish his case. Why must the ?righteousness of God?
mean exactly the same thing all the time? Scripture employs the word
?sanctification? in various ways (Acts 20:32; Heb. 9:13; 1 Pet. 1:2)
and the term ?justification? clearly is assigned different meanings
in Scripture (Matt. 11:19; Rom. 3:28; 1 Tim. 3:16). Why must the
semantic field of ?the righteousness of God? be limited to God?s
?covenant faithfulness? only? I see no reason to grant Wright this
point. I submit that Wright has committed the exegetical fallacy of
an ?unwarranted restriction of the semantic field.?
This is
especially apparent in light of 2 Cor. 5:21, which says, ?He made
Him who knew no sin to be sin on our behalf, that we might become
the righteousness of God in Him.? How can we become God?s
covenant judging righteousness? Wright senses this problem and
argues that since the passage is primarily about apostolic ministry,
the text means that the apostles are the ?embodiment of the message
they proclaim? (105); that is, the apostles represent God?s ?judging
righteousness.? But this is strange and forced, especially when one
considers the fact that the passage is not merely about the
apostles, but also about the salvific content of the apostolic
message. It is about the death of Christ (2 Cor. 5:14, 15), becoming
a new creature (2 Cor. 5:17), reconciliation (2 Cor. 5:19), and the
forgiveness of sins (2 Cor. 5:19). Wright is adamant that it would
be odd for Paul to insert a statement about imputed righteousness at
this point. Nevertheless, the whole passage is clearly about the
message of salvation. Therefore, imputed righteousness fits
perfectly here.
Wright says
that it would make no sense for God to transfer his righteousness to
sinners. But, in Phil. 3:9 Paul says that he desires to ?be found in
him, not having a righteousness of my own derived from the law, but
that which is through faith in Christ, the righteousness which comes
from God on the basis of faith.? Clearly this ?righteousness? is
graciously ?passed? from God to the believing sinner. This is
apparent from the fact that Paul says it is not a ?righteousness of
my own.? What does that mean? It means that the ?righteousness? was
not at first Paul?s, but came from someone else. This gift of
?righteousness? is not a judicial covenant verdict rendered on the
basis of personal conformity to covenant stipulations. We know this
because Paul says plainly that this righteousness is not ?derived
from the law.? Rather, it is a free gift that comes from God (Rom.
3:24; 4:4; 10:3, 4). Many other passages support the Reformed
teaching of imputed righteousness (Rom. 1:17; 4:1-25; 5:17, 21,
etc.). Also, John Piper?s book, Counted Righteous in Christ
(Wheaton: Crossway, 2002) is an excellent treatment of the subject.
The
doctrine of imputation has been part of the soul of Reformed
orthodoxy for good reason. It is linked to the federal theology,
which sees the law-gospel contrast in terms of the representative
headships of Adam and Christ (Rom. 5:12-19); so, to attack
imputation is to do violence to the essence of the gospel and the
very heart of Reformed covenant theology. This is exactly what
Wright has done. Regarding the imputation of Christ?s active
obedience, Machen reportedly said, ?I'm so thankful for the active
obedience of Christ. No hope without it.? Without Reformed
federalism and the imputed righteousness of Christ, the law and the
gospel threaten to collapse into a bland mixture that is neither the
law nor the gospel, but a legalism, which will inevitably produce
disastrous practical implications in the church.
Justification
Luther said
that justification is ?the doctrine by which the church stands or
falls?
and Calvin wrote that justification is ?the main hinge on which
religion turns.?
Wright, however, downplays the doctrine of justification by faith
and argues that Paul?s primary theological concern was not
justification, but the covenant lordship of Christ, understood from
the perspective of second temple Judaism (45, 88, 113, 114, 151).
Wright belittles the historic Christian view of justification in the
following:
People are
always trying to pull themselves up by their own moral bootstraps.
They try to save themselves by their own efforts; to make themselves
good enough for God, or for heaven. This doesn?t work; one can only
be saved by sheer unmerited grace of God, appropriated not by
good works but by faith. This account of justification owes a
good deal both to the controversy between Pelagius and Augustine in
the early fifth century and to that between Erasmus and Luther in
the early sixteenth century. (113 [emphasis mine])
Wright then
says that this false notion of justification, which has come
to us from Augustine and Luther, ?does not do justice to the
richness and precision of Paul?s doctrine, and indeed distorts it at
various points? (113). He even goes so far as to say that the
Reformed reading of the book of Romans ?has systematically done
violence to the text for hundreds of years? (117).
So, if the
Reformation got justification wrong, what is Wright?s alternative?
He says, ?Justification is not a matter of how someone enters the
community of the true people of God, but of how you tell who belongs
to that community, not least in the period of time before the
eschatological event itself, when the matter will become public
knowledge? (119). More specifically, it is about how you can tell
who is a member of the covenant (122), and who can anticipate the
eschatological covenant verdict of justification (119). Even though
Wright says that the covenant is somehow to ?deal with sin? (118),
he explains, ?In standard Christian theological language, it wasn?t
so much about soteriology as about ecclesiology; not so much about
salvation as the church? (119). Obviously, there is a biblical
connection between ecclesiology and justification, but is it
biblical to say that justification is essentially ?about
ecclesiology??
BDAG
defines all of the
dik-
words as righteousness, justification, justify, justice, fairness,
uprightness, acquittal, etc.,
all of which are perfectly consistent with the traditional doctrine
of justification. However, not a single definition of any word in
this word group even hints at the notion that it has something to do
with ecclesiology. Wright departs significantly from mainline
scholarship at this point. Greek scholars agree that ?justification?
means that God declares someone righteous on the basis of a legal
relationship, but Wright says that ?justification? is God?s
declaration of who is ?in? the covenant.
Wright is
inconsistent in this. On the one hand, he wants rigidly to restrict
the range of ?the righteousness of God? to a single technical
meaning. On the other hand, he is willing to assert confidently that
the central sense of ?justify? is something that he alone has
discovered. The meaning he gives to ?justify? is completely beyond
the semantic range assigned by standard Greek lexicons. This seems
arbitrary.
Does
Romans bear out the notion that ?justification? is more about
ecclesiology than soteriology? It does not. In chapter one, Paul
declares that after creation, men sinned, and that God?s wrath is
revealed against this human sinfulness. In chapter two, Paul says
that since the giving of the law, the Jews sinned against it, and
the Gentiles sinned against the law written on their hearts. In the
beginning of chapter three, Paul says that all are condemned under
sin and judgment, and he says that neither Jews nor Gentiles can be
justified by the works of the law. What then is God?s solution to
sin? It is that though ?all have sinned and fall short of the glory
of God? (Rom. 3:23), both Jews and Gentiles can be ?justified as a
gift by his grace through the redemption which is in Christ Jesus?
(Rom. 3:24). Contrary to Wright, Scripture teaches that
justification is God?s solution to the world?s sin problem. God?s
Word clearly teaches us that justification is about salvation
primarily. Hence, in terms of what the Bible says, justification is
not a declaration of who is already in the covenant. Rather,
justification is how people get into the covenant in the first
place. The gift of justification is the way by which God reconciles
himself to human beings.
Syncretism
Ironically,
while Wright says that the incorrect Reformed understanding of
salvation and justification is the result of reading the controversy
with Roman Catholicism back into the text, his own version of
justification looks remarkably like post-modern inclusivism and
ecumenism. Wright says that the doctrine of justification should
re-unite Roman Catholics, Protestants, and all Christian
denominations because ?justification is in fact the great ecumenical
doctrine? (158). In a manner reminiscent of the spirit of an age
more concerned with experience than doctrinal truth, Wright plays
down the doctrine of justification. He says, ?One is not justified
by faith by believing in justification by faith? (159). However, the
book of Galatians is about soteric justification by grace through
faith (Gal. 2:16; 3:11, 12), and it teaches that believing this
aspect of the gospel is essential for salvation (Gal. 1:8, 9). To be
sure, that does not mean that every Christian must understand
justification with the precision of a theologian. But it does mean
that every Christian will have some knowledge of the fact that Jesus
alone saves him and accepts him by grace through faith, apart from
his own personal achievements. In that sense, believing the doctrine
of justification is indeed essential for salvation.
Conclusion
Though the
preceding has been a negative critique, some parts of the book are
superb. For example, Wright?s chapter on Paul?s doctrine of the
deity of Christ is excellent. He ably demonstrates that Paul
utilizes Old Testament categories to show that Jesus is identified
with God. Also, Wright?s emphasis on the fact that the Messiah is
Lord and King is entirely appropriate. His emphasis on King Jesus
serves as a much-needed corrective to the easy-believism found in
some quarters of contemporary Christianity. However, though the
author?s commitment to the divine authority of Christ and
Scripture is refreshing, his adjustments to the doctrine of
justification undermine the heart of the gospel itself. Furthermore,
he offers nothing to replace it. Though he speaks of salvation and
of the covenant remedy to the problem of sin, Wright does not
explain how human beings are in fact saved. Inevitably, if
imputation is eliminated and if the doctrine of free justification
by faith alone is abolished, human works will rush in to fill the
vacuum. Thus, students and theologians of the Reformed tradition
must study and answer N.T. Wright because the gospel of grace is at
stake.
